Slashdot Mirror
What Is Real On YouTube?
An anonymous reader writes, "The popularity of user-generated video sites like YouTube has given rise to deceptive videos created for self-promotion, advertising, or even smearing rival brands. This latter format, dubbed the 'smear video,' depicts a rival brand's product exhibiting fictitious faults. One example is the 21-second YouTube video entitled 'Samsung handset, easy to break at one try!', which shows a smiling woman easily snapping the new Samsung Ultra Edition mobile phone in half. Samsung says the phone was rigged to snap and the video has now been removed from the site. The article also accuses those who created the now infamous Lonelygirl15 YouTube videos of 'deception for profit. Misrepresenting commercials as independent user-generated content, actors as members of the public, and fiction as fact.' Will user-generated video sites increasingly confront visitors with the disturbing possibility that the video they're watching is not a home video at all, but a sophisticated ad campaign?"
Slashdot users are pretty adept at spotting slashvertisements and astrotrufing (better than the slashdot editors, it would seem. Did anyone think "lonelygirl15" was real?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
i'm kinda unclear on how the whole lonelygirl project generated much/any profit.
I am shocked, shocked I tell you! LonleyGirl isn't real?! People would actually post videos that are not what they appear to be?!
This comes as a great revelation to us all!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
This has been a main criticism of the internet since the first newsgroups began appearing years ago. You could always write a blog or review of something posing as anyone pretending to know anything. YouTube is no different, save the fact that manipulation and misrepresentation of facts can be created and shared easily in a video format. I fail to see how this is a new (read: interesting) question.
It's obvious from the skillful editing (watch how the timing of the cuts seem like a documentary or a "reality" show and not like some kid on a webcam) that at the very least lonelygirl "knew what she was doing" and was creating a narrative rather than just randomly talking about her life. That this narrative was created by professionals should come as no surprise.
Maybe THIS story was posted by YouTube's competitors! NOW WHO DO YOU BELIEVE?
Well It's A Good Thing(tm) that we have TV to tell us what's right and wrong instead of misguiding internet sites...
;-)
Joke aside, the internet is a media like TV and newspapers and should be treated equally: With sceptism.
The only thing that keeps us away from being puppets of the media is our ability to judge and do a reality check. If you see something "stunning" or amazing - be sure that the first thing you do is disregard it for a moment and don't start telling it to others, since that's when speculation and lies become "the uofficial truth".
But then again.. if we were all able to tell when the media was lying... I guess there wouldn't be tabloids
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I go around bitching about a company with bogus claims of its products' deficiencies, isn't that libel? So why would doing it in video be any better?
All of the these "social networking" sites suffer the same affliction. They are all just another source of ad revenue for marketers and the people running the sites.
I think it was Bruce Sterling, if anyone recognizes it, let me know.
They were talking about the concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones, like the ones in the carribean that pirates frequented - lawless places which somehow managed to govern themselves, and because the interview was in Wired around 1999 or so, the interviewer likened it to afterhours raves and waxed poetic about how awesome it'd be and how we'd be free of corporate etc etc. So the interviewee said "You want to see a TAZ in action, you go look at a toxic-waste dumping 'rave' - where a corporation hires some dubious character to take barrels of waste out into the TAZ that is the open ocean and just throw it over the side. That's the destiny of a TAZ, not some hippy vision of freedom and egalitarianism." Of course, I'm butchering the quote, but gimme a break, I read it like 7 years ago.
Anyhow, the point of this exasperatingly long-winded anecdote is that things like youtube, which promise freedom and creativity for all will always end up used for evil for the same reason as the TAZ - because freedom is nice and everything, but money trumps all. And the money will drive a wedge of mistrust between us all.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
"...actors as members of the public, and fiction as fact."
It sounds like big media don't want amateurs moving in on their territory.
Real or not, lonelygirl15's whiny voice made me want to vomit so hard after 15 seconds I "like totally" didn't visit youtube for an entire week.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
The internet would never lie to me. Did you know that the population of elephants in Africa has tripled in the last six months?
An article submitted by an "anonymous" user purporting to be about the authenticity of web content and art vs advertisement, but instead linking back to a site that makes most of its money from advertisements, product reviews, and page views....
I don't know about you, but I'm a little ironied out...
Who cares if the video of snapping a Samsung phone in half is real or not? Even if a rival company paid to have that spot made and distributed, it HAD to come from somewhere. Samsung says it was rigged, but they didn't just invent the fact the phone is cheap. It was probably based on complaints and testing. If it was completely made up, it wouldn't rise in popularity. It's like stereotypes - you might not like them, but there's SOME basis in fact. Or else it would never catch on.
What if someone whose Samsung phone broke made that video versus a rival company making it. Would it matter? I don't think so. Because again, SOMEONE had to have problems with that phone breaking. Whether a rival company made and paid for it or the pissed off consumer did it for free, I don't think it matters...
People get mad about not knowing when they're being advertised to. They shouldn't. Everyone has agendas. Do your research and listen to more than one source.
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
and most countries do it to their citizens in order to achieve some end.
Now, companies and people can do it to each other!
Seriously though, take a step back for a moment and ask yourself a couple of questions:
1. Why should I trust anything on the site in question? They don't say they are purveyors of trustworthy data. I think the problem is that "trustworthy videos" may not be an expectation they want to meet.
2. What does anyone gain by visiting the site in question?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Most of the people in the Slashdot community have been "online" for decades now. We have watched the Internet become something so big that a signal entity can't wield enough power to control it any longer. Yet, like all modern entertainment and communication formats, there is a certain amount of deception that takes place. For years people have made the on-going joke that the "girl" with the screen name of "supersexysweet16" is actually some fat guy in his underwear either screwing around or preying on juveniles. Now, we have news organizations like Dateline activly trapping people with deceptive tactics that the police have been using to nab predators for a while.
Asking the question "Will user-generated video sites increasingly confront visitors with the disturbing possibility that the video they're watching is not a home video at all, but a sophisticated ad campaign?" at this point in the history of the Internet is just silly and evidence that the "Anonymous Reader" is woefully out of touch with reality and needs to quit being so naive. Deception is everywhere. Even the bum on the street begging for your change may not even be a REAL bum. There are so many deceptive acts taking place out there and if YouTube letting some unscrupulous ad agency post an ad to generate revenue is the biggest worry I have then I'd say I'm doing pretty good.
In other words, big deal. I'm not going to YouTube to determine what's real and what's not or who's lying to me about what. It's so inconsequential that I don't even care who's going to get sent up the river for such a travesty. I'm going to YouTube to be entertained and even commercials are entertaining at times. Just watch the commercials on the SuperBowl for evidence of that. If someone on YouTube wants to lie to me about it then fine, it's not going to impact my life adversely because I don't believe everything I read, see or hear. Especially if there is only one instance of bad press like the Samsung phone when there are droves of people out there with opinions that are the polar opposite. It's on me if I am so gullible to not see through something as silly as that Samsung video that was posted. It's even worse if I base a consumer decision on such a video and limit my research to just that video. Shame on me for being such a stooge if that were true.
--- Greenpeace Apologizes for Apple Stink
It's the tubes. You see, things have to chopped into little pieces, appropriately called "bits" to be sent through the tubes without clogging them. Real girls can not survive being chopped into bits! So no, nothing you see on the internet is real. Why just yesterday I was hungry and told one of my aides to send me a ham sandwich through the internets. They asked me how to go about that and I told them to scan it in and send it by email. When it got here, I printed it out, and let me tell you, it tasted nothing like a ham sandwich!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I don't think that anyone will really care (much) if the content they're viewing on youtube or Google video or whatever else is out there is an advertisement or not - as long as it is entertaining. That's the whole point behind advertising, trying to keep your target audience entertained long enough to maybe get an ad in edgewise. Youtube is chock full of amusing little adverts that I watch to entertain myself. Heck, even if its not blatant advertising or bashing, as long as I get a chuckle or a "That was awesome!" from it, then the point is made. If the advertising people are doing their homework and learning to take advantage of a new medium, then kudos to them, as long as it stays entertaining.
So please, ad people, continue bringing us your Wazzaaaaaa's and your Geico Gekkos and your dancing transforming cars, and whatever else you can think of, blatant or not. Make me laugh. Make me yell. Make me think about buying your products, or of discontinuing service with your competitors. I will continue to temper my decisions with research and past experiences as my guides, but if you have a truely superior product or service to offer, then I will appreciate a truely superior ad campaign to tell me of it.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
The people with money and power (either directly, or government apointed 'civil servants' who have defacto ownership - essentially state capitalists) are already living in a total autonomy zone. The people with money and power do what they like, when they like, and don't have to worry about any law because it doesn't apply to them.
Total Autonomous Zones are about giving the common people the same freedom that the rich and powerful already enjoy. Dumping in the oceans you say? Already happens nowadays, without any restrictions, so long as you are rich and powerful enough, or you are a government. And big corporations, or government officials, already engage in FUD campaigns both on and off line, without any restrictions.
All laws and regulations are laws and regulations designed to restrict the poor, or those who are less politically powerful (in a political economy, effectively the same as the poor).
Most of the content on YouTube is either pirated, marketing material, or total crap.
Which is a real problem. YouTube is starting to have the problems Napster did, with lawsuits from content owners cropping up every few days. Legitimate ones, too. Putting someone else's music on someone else's video and redistributing it is not original work. Not even close.
YouTube is starting to deal with this. "Removed for terms of service violation" messages are showing up more frequently. But that cuts into their free content supply.
So what's going up now? Marketing material. All ads, all the time. Music videos this week, with the Warner deal.
Already, more than half the YouTube screen space is third-party ads anyway. And YouTube is signed up with everybody. Watch a YouTube page load stall while "yieldmanager.com", "atmdt.com", "doubleclick.com", "insightexpressai.com", "euroclick.com" and "tacoda.net" ("an end-to-end marketing application used for analyzing customer interactions and segmenting and monetizing audience members") all are read. For one page.
YouTube is not the next Google. YouTube is the next MP3.com.
You are free to say "Company X sucks", or "I think Product Y is cheap crap". However, to say "Product Y breaks so easily, this woman can do it without any effort" is making a supposedly factual statement. You are free to express an opinion all you want, but when you get into statements of measurable fact, you better hope the numbers back you up.
Or, to put it another way - I can go online and say "Joe's a butthead" just fine. But, if I'm gonna go saying "Joe just beat up a homeless cripple and stole his blanket", I'm opening myself up to a lawsuit if, indeed, Joe did not perform these acts, and I knew as much.
Oh, and as video is a fixed format, it would be a libel case. Slander is for transientory defamation, such as unrecorded speech - i.e., I go shouting it on the street corner, or start telling all my friends this "fact". You got it right, but I've already seen a lot of others get it wrong so far...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
This isn't really all that new. I think things like Lonelygirl (and going back to the Blair Witch Project (marketing disguised as authentic recorded experiences)) are making people more cynical about what they see in general. Every time I see something that looks "authentic" on YouTube (or anywhere else for that matter), I'm inclined to doubt its true source. Maybe it's better that, by finding out there's so much "fake" information out there, we don't just blindly believe everything we see. But in a way, it's also a sad commentary on what mass media and the marketing engine have done to the dissemination of true information for worthwhile purposes. I guess as long as there's a buck to be made.....
> Total Autonomous Zones are about giving the common people the same freedom that the rich and powerful already enjoy
Right, but the guy's point was that these zones would always be co-opted, and that while living in a society of law is kind of a pain in the ass at times, it's the citizens only protection against larger, more powerful entities such as corporations, and that the desire for autonomous zones is a nice idea but in practice amounts to suicide.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Dang, forgot to respond to this:
> All laws and regulations are laws and regulations designed to restrict the poor, or those who are less politically powerful
Well now, that's patently false. I'll just point you at car safety and tobacco/liquor advertising laws and make my exit.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
In W. Gibson's latest novel "Pattern Recognition", there are a series of videos/short films posted anonymously on the internet. Noone knows who is posting them and why; Marketing companies all hunger for a chance to get some of the hype surrounding the posted short videos. I won't ruin the ending for you, but it is a story of marketing types and anonymous artistic video postings.
This is very applicable to what is happening on YouTube now; self-made work are being fostered by these types of user generated content sites. The problem is the viewer has non idea if those self made works are sponsored by companies, or if they are just 'solo artist in a room somewhere' type of works.
Who says we can't enjoy ads? I don't view You Tube as a "home video only" site as much as a "if this video is interesting I'll watch it" site. Personally, I don't care who created the content, if it's good, I'll consume it.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
Isn't this more or less the same as the "news reports" on television which are actually paid for advertisements? I mean, sure they have more license to mislead since there isn't a broadcasting company vetting the commercials for legal implications, but it's still deceptive multimedia.
Someone's post related this to piracy on the seas, or dumping toxis sludge when noone was around to spot them, but youTube is bound to be a bit different - this sludge isn't sludge until someone views it, at which point it can be demoted as disinformation. At that point, this slashdot posting would be as significant as a posting about a troll writing a misleading comment.
So give it 6 months and this story will only have historic significance.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Let's be clear, here. Although the creators of lonelygirl wound up being represented by CAA, a professional talent agency, they are nevertheless a bunch of young amateurs. The videos don't promote any product (except for purple monkey hand puppets, maybe), and the only sort of cross-marketing involved is, perhaps, the use of CAA-represented indie bands for background music. All in all the music is pretty unobtrusive and tasteful, and is far from the main point of the videos.
Lonelygirl is, at its heart, a series about an extremely compelling character, and her video diary makes people feel an intimate connection with her. I have to say, the series was even more enjoyable when one could believe that Bree was a real girl, seriptitiously posting her thoughts, colored by her signature humor and innocence, from her bedroom. Now that she's been "outed" as an actress, the "show" is a little more conventional, but when you're willing to suspend your disbelief, it's still wonderfully fun to watch.
In short, Lonelygirl is damn good television, except that it's not on television.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
This is just an example of the Tragedy of the Commons.
The part that says, "Buffering..."
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
If youtube gives in to every narrow interest that wants something pulled, it will definitely lose its edge and some of its market share.
However, most attempts to create exceptions on any kind of large scale have (so far) been corrupted to the point where they cease to be freedoms and enslave those who embrace them. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that freedom of the individual enslaves the collective, and freedom of the collective enslaves the group, that you cannot be simultaneously a free individual AND a member of a free society. There are also good reasons - totally independently of money - for believing that both extremes are unstable. As soon as one segment becomes more free than another, or more influential than another, there will be a natural drift of power away from those with less and towards those with more. Eventually, neither the individuals nor the collective will be free.
You will never, ever see an introverted, non-judgemental, empathic, intellectually exploratory, emotionally self-sufficient President of America. Geeks make up about 10% of the population, and socially-conscious geeks probably make about 2-3%. That 3% probably understands the dynamics of the world better than the other 97%, but their total influence is a big, fat zero. It's not even remotely close to even their proportion in society. This is in part because they're far too busy doing things they consider important, but it still means that their "freedoms" are dictated by some other group, which makes it more a permission than a freedom.
Having said that, nobody has yet developed a workable alternative, including the intellectually exploratory and socially conscious, suggesting that freedom will remain a mere delusion for a long time yet. In the example in the parent post, power will naturally drift into the hands of those who would dump toxic waste (it's cheap) or despoil a place to gain an advantage (political or economic expediency). It's mostly about money, just not entirely about money. It's also about what makes a person good at what they do, and why that eliminates a large fraction of the populace from ever having any meaningful say.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You can't believe everything you read/see/hear on the Internet?
Holy shit, this really is breaking news; I mean, it's not like this has been common sense since the Internet was invented or anything.
I seriously fail to see how this is news. Entire political campaigns are built on smear advertisements (anyone remember the last election?), and the Internet doesn't even have to comply with any type of law that keeps those smear ads from being worse than they are now; is it any wonder these videos are being put online?
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Car safety laws are designed to maintain the oligarchy of large automotive companies... They were pushed for by the big auto companies in order to make automobile development as capital intensive as possible, thereby locking out smaller competition. Prior to car safety regulation, people were not any more likely to die in an auto accident than they are now, and there were something close to 100 American auto companies. After the consolidation of the big 3, the only "new" auto companies to compete on the U.S. market have been large foriegn companies (who are essentially one of the big established players in their own country). Even now, the U.S. keeps a lot of European small cars out of the U.S. market by insane safety regulations (which is why you can't buy a tiny little fuel efficient peugot or citron something similiar in the U.S.)
In the case of Tobacco and Liquor advertising laws, they also help the established players. New companies, smaller companies, need advertisment to compete with larger companies (which are already ubiquitous, so they don't need advertising). Advertising laws are a barrier to market for small companies, where as the large companies can afford to sponser a formula 1 racing team and have their logo all on TV (essentially skirting the law).
If you look at ANY regulation that is passed, with the exception of regulation that is essentially already a social moor (such as laws against murder, rape, etc.), they are designed for the benfit of powerful economic interests.
"I can go online and say "Joe's a butthead" just fine"
You could, but it would hurt my feelings... ; )
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Oh come on.
... well, I don't know, but I'm sure you have a tinfoil hat answer for that one too.
> Prior to car safety regulation, people were not any more likely to die in an auto accident than they are now
Seat belts don't save lives, eh? Ralph Nader was just a tool of the auto industry? Big Tobacco engineered the ban on cigarette advertising on TV as a clever ruse to lock out the smaller producers, who through some nebulous market forces are unable to sponsor racing teams? Standard Oil was broken up because it
I'll agree that in general, laws are written by the rich for the rich, but there are also some that are written for the little guy by good legislators. If that wasn't the case, there'd be no such thing as a class action suit, no such thing as OSHA, no anti-trust laws (ok, well there practically aren't any more, but you know what I mean), etc.
Taking a position that ALL laws favor the rich with NO EXCEPTIONS is simply ridiculous.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
You know, you can just type "n" or "e".
I'm pretty sure a google search will show enough examples of "prior art" =)
Without the all-powerful profit motive we would all be vacant-eyed lumps of nothing being eaten alive by our own shoelaces!!
Ha! That's what you think. I wear loafers. In your face, shoelace!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
n/t
So you're with the other guy, the one who insists that Big Tobacco really doesn't at all mind not being able to advertise on TV and plastering their products with "WARNING: THIS PRODUCT WILL KILL YOU"? The one who contends that the fight the auto companies put up against mandatory seat belts was somehow a ruse and they really wanted them all the time so that they could somehow use this to drive out smaller car companies?
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.